Geraldine teenager discusses shark find in Guntersville lake

Interview today with Matthew Barrett, 16, of Geraldine on his July 21 discovery of a shark's carcass.

A state biologist had been telling his mother the fish he found at a resort area near Guntersville appeared to be a bull shark, regarded by some marine experts to be the most dangerous of all shark species. Although it would be the first doumentation of a bull shark in Guntersville Lake, they have been found in the Mississippi River in Cairo, Ill.

But the same biologist, Dan Catchings of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Division of Wildlife and Fisheries, said late this afternoon that the state's Marine Resource Division identified the carcass as that of an Atlantic Sharpnose Shark. According to an expert in the division, he said this particular species grows to about four feet long and would never go that far inland.